Word: manon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...biggest hits of the Edinburgh Festival is young (27) U.S. Tenor David Poleri. A Philadelphian who began to study voice only five years ago, Poleri got little attention in his own country until he made his debut in Manon at the New York City Opera this spring (TIME, April 2)-and had some listeners mentioning him in the same breath with Caruso. As Don Alvaro in Verdi's bloody La Forza del Destino last week, Poleri had the same kind of effect on Edinburgh. Wrote the critic of the London Daily Express: "The kind of tenor singing which...
...comparatively compact City Center Theater, Stage Director José Ruben, veteran of both opera and Broadway (and once Sarah Bernhardt's leading man), made Manon move through all its five acts with proper sentiment and subtlety. In the pit, French Conductor Jean Morel kept the pace clean and precise. And the singing, French diction included, of City Opera's young Americans could hardly have been better...
...Angeles-born Soprano Ann Ayars looked and sounded well in the part of the loving, pleasure-mad, 18th Century Manon. What she lacked in artfulness, her gallant and unhappy lover made up in charm and ardor. As the Chevalier des Grieux, young (27) Philadelphia-born Tenor David Poleri turned out to be one of the finds of the season. Laszlo Halasz, director of City Opera, heard Poleri last fall on a Chicago radio show. Handsome Poleri sang Des Grieux as if he had learned it straight from Caruso; his voice, less powerful and assured, is sweeter, lighter in color...
...shrewd Director Halasz picked Manon? Partly because, under Conductor Morel, he had "the strongest French wing in the U.S. To be brutally frank," saic Halasz, there was another, equally good reason: "The Met didn't do very much with the French repertory this season...
...know," he said with a glance at his friend Rudolf Bing, who had come to hear Manon, "now that the Met has an alert director, I have to be very alert...